What you are suggesting the police should do is simply not practical. Who would they ask for a stream url? Do you want everyone running a stream to register with the local police? Do you want police to begin doubting every report or threat of imminent violence, endangering everyone who legitimately needs help?

When you get a call reporting an active shooter followed by gunshots you don't check twitch, you go. You bring the amount of force necessary to deal with what may be occurring but you use the minimum amount of force necessary to take control of the situation. That no one has died yet as a result of swatting suggests that they're largely doing their jobs. Whether or not they're responding to every situation, real or fictitious with excessive force is an entirely separate issue.

Jail IS a deterrent as these people have no expectation they will be caught and believe sentences would be light anyway. If they can become more proficient at finding these people, and sentences become more severe, it will absolutely reduce the number of incidents.

Creating a system where buyers can extort and outright steal from you with little recourse and no mechanism for warning others of their behavior was a GREAT idea. I should be able to neg a guy for buying my item and not paying for it so that his identical item at a higher price could sell. I should be able to neg someone for a chargeback after the item's been delivered. I should be able to neg someone for trying to return their damaged item in place of the good working item I sent.

They've created an environment where the buyer has nothing to lose from bad behavior.

And in many of those silly European countries you can sue someone and prevail for making a factual statement. In the US, this commenter might have to spend money on his defense and win. In Europe, they could spend money and lose.

In the state I live in (Massachusetts) $3,333 won't even cover a year at a community college.

This table lists the estimated cost of in-state (i.e. subsidized) tuition and fees for all state supported colleges in Massachusetts for the last 10 years, without room and board.
http://www.mass.edu/campuses/res_total.asp

In 2012-13, a year at community college was in the 4-6k range, state colleges 8-10k, and 11-12k for a UMass campus. Room and board goes for roughly 6-7k at a state college and 10k at UMass. Even if you find a job in college that covers all of your non tuition expenses (good luck), you're entering this job market with between 32k and 50k of debt, add room and board alone and that becomes 60-90k. And if you want to attend a more prestigious university, you're looking at 50-60k per year.

Add years of underemployment after graduation to that and it's easily a lifetime of crippling debt.

Thats strictly a paper loss, the Wilpons profited from their relationship with Madoff. They deposited about $700 million and withdrew about a billion over the course of 5 years, their only losses were the ficticious profits they hadn't yet withdrawn. A recent ruling limited their liability to only what was invested in the last 2 years, and likely only the profit they made of about $83 million.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/29/business/mets-ruling-may-reduce-payout-to-madoff-victims.html
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/madoff-ruling-a-big-win-for-mets-owners-2011-09-28

If you can't speak frankly and candidly in your private, secret, and classified communications with the government you represent, how are you supposed to do your job? How do you give your government good information and an accurate assessment of the situation on the ground? If your impression of the President of Afghanistan is that he's corrupt and paranoid, your country needs to know.

Suggesting that we extend political correctness into classified communications is completely absurd. The expectation is that these documents will never see the light of day until they're only relevant in an historical context.

You follow orders because you don't have the big picture. It may be that the manner in which you accomplish your objective is more important than the outcome, something that you're not aware of could easily depend on how and not if.

The common failure among us geeks is that we tend to think we know more than everyone else. You don't always have all of the information in front of you, and thats an absolute necessity for the military.

Maybe next they'll go after Coca-Cola for bundling their bottle and can hardware with proprietary liquids.

In order to be an effective deterrent, you need a stockpile large enough to survive a nuclear first strike, and penetrate the enemy's defenses.

"Big enough to kill everything on the planet" is quite arbitrary, if your enemy thinks they can take out most or all of your nukes before you can retaliate, then you have no deterrent at all.